King Arthur, a supernatural “role-playing wargame” from Neocore games in Hungary, surely is looking neat (although rather similar to their previous Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come). In the video below the excitingly-named Zoltan Varga explains a little about what that genre-mash means, and what the mystical medievalism of the game entails. Varga talks through the dialogue trees that knights will face, and shows how the game is a little bit like Total War’s turn-based vs real-time mix, only with more focus on the development of the individual knights.

Just so you have a flavour of the game, that guy above is lovely Sir Lancelot, and – as the video reveals – foot-soldiers are at risk of being dragged into spell-summoned hell-vortexes in the sky. Yeah, comedy cavaliers it ain’t. Go watch the video.

Stone, Paper, Scissors method! I think games based around soft counters are more interesting. Anyway, the game looks pretty cool, I’ll be looking forward to a wot I think on this Stone, Paper, Shotgun.

“Wow, I’ve been waiting for a game of this nature for years and now this one pops out of no where.”

“no where” is pretty damn accurate. So accurate, in fact, that it’s outright suspicious. I never heard about Crusader(s?): Thy Kingdom Come, and it doesn’t look like the kind of game that just quietly slips by. Neither did I know about Neocore existing.
No Wiki articles on Neocore, Crusader(s?) or the King Arthur, either.

Not enough in the video to tell. In future instalments look out for units who’ve dismounted and forgotten how to get back on their horses and artillery that frags all the heroes on their own side. If seen then it is a perfect TW clone.

Could we all please stop calling games that have Total War style RTS battles (i.e. RTS battles where you control large formations of troops instead of single units and that take things like morale and terrain into account) “Total War ripoffs” or accusing them of copying Total War?

When was the last time you called an FPS a Doom clone? Or said that an RTS copied Dune 2?

Looks promising, but I would prefer turn-based and more simplified combat like in Master of Magic. My battles in Total War games always degenerate to chaotic mess. And this has spells to make it even more disastrous!

Could we all please stop calling games that have Total War style RTS battles (i.e. RTS battles where you control large formations of troops instead of single units and that take things like morale and terrain into account) “Total War ripoffs” or accusing them of copying Total War?

Yeah. Warhammer: Dark Omen and its predecessor Shadow of the Horned Rat did Total War style battles before Total War ever did.

The Total War ‘formula’, in its basic state, goes really quite far back and has been touched by numerous creators. Fantasy Empires from Silicon Knights / SSI was my first experience with the formula, and it was quite a nice game, still a great concept although the battle system doesn’t quite get across the grandeur of large scale battles like modern 3D games can.

This King Author video really grabbed my attention when they got to the part where you send your knights on adventures and click through dialogue / event trees. Oh sure, it’s just text boxes that you click and then depending on what branch you end up going down it determines the consequences — but that’s really the best way a videogame can actually be a roleplaying game. The closest analogue to sitting down across the table from a competent DM / storyteller and playing through his campaign is things like that. The _mechanics_ of a roleplaying game are commonplace in game design, but real story decisions that impact the destiny of your character is very rare.

Obviously game designers can’t allow you to do anything in their games, but a dialogue tree with just text and pictures ala Space Rangers II is at least a method of trying to cover as many reasonable possibilities as they can, and face players with real choices without taking weeks to code each and every choice.

I’m probably making it sound more grandiose than it is, though, especially since we can’t make out what the text actually was and whether it was telling a good story, or whether the consequences of those little vignettes were actually important, or whether or not there’s enough different stories and possibilities to keep things fresh for awhile, but it gives me hope at least.

I’m a little leery of blending tactical battles with roleplaying elements and devastating powers, seems tricky to balance, but if they pull it off it could be a great deal of fun. I’d think it would really help those of us who feel a little helpless in Total War’s battles, since we could approach it as a roleplaying game and win through shrewd use of powers rather than tricky mass maneuvering of troops.

Quote:
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“Ambush at Sorinor is definitely unique. As a result, it is hard to tell who would like it and who wouldn’t. From a purely strategic standpoint, there is a lot of variety but not a large scope (each battle takes only a quarter hour or so to complete). From an RPG standpoint, there are familiar characters but you don’t have much (if any) individual control during actual combat. It is a good game to play if you enjoy creating your own games like I do (using the map/scenario editors) or if you like strategy but don’t have a lot of free time.”
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Is fun how the reviewer don’t “get it”. He was comparing a total war game to D&D rpg games. He was genuinely puzzled, because the game was original (to him) so to no use for a gamer. I don’t expect people to like games that are genuinely original.

let’s hope for a pause button to get everything back in control all 20seconds or so. i cannot understand why they do not consider to make it turn-based.
dialogs, control over your heros at the Ropund Table look really great. reminds me a lot of HoMM which is a good thing. if only the HoMM developers would try to push that many new ideas into that series…that curse spell colse to the end really looked like an animation of a spell in HoMM5!

Color me VERY interested. Game mechanics seem to be a mix between the TW games and Dark Omen, which can only be a good thing. Art style is dark (THANK YOU EASTERN EUROPE), instead of bright fairy tale la-la land style.

@IvanHoeHo: it idiotically streams the whole thing again, wasting your precious bandwidth. Is there any setting that can stop it from doing that?

Not an RPS problem I think, it’s the site serving up the video. In my case I don’t even see the video embed unless I tell Noscript to allow v.giantrealm. When I did that, and before I clicked play on either video, it started grabbing data from gametrailers to the extent that it started killing the BBC iPlayer running in another tab and I had to close this page and come back later. If I’d clicked play then fair enough, I’m saying I want to be sent data, to start consuming significant bandwidth just because I’ve landed on the page is rather antisocial behaviour.